text by Daniel Bosser (ENG / FRA)

(faire défiler pour la version française)

After practicing drawing, mostly large format self-portraits, while studying at the ENSA of Cergy which he left with a degree in 2011, Paul Maheke has been exploring other artistic fields in the form of actions in the urban or rural public space, usually not devoted to art.
What he calls “the light form” of his action consists of leading ephemeral, minimalist, discrete activities in the most unexpected places over the course of many journeys (Europe, Reunion, Quebec, China…). These actions of a ghostly wanderer often take on the form of enigmatic objects abandoned in situ like strange indications. Three small monochrome canvases left on a parking lot under a sign bearing the owner’s name, small black plaques placed on protective railings that overlook a station and on which the artist has engraved the descriptions of landscapes, tree stumps covered in painting in the forest are manifestations of what he calls “the art of the ghost”. Paul Maheke leaves his artistic objects the discretion of an unknown. When they find an owner, they invite him or her to question what is given as art.
Disappearance and reappearance intersect furtively at the corner of a street, the bend of a country road like a possibility of poetic reading of his almost immaterial practices. Paul Maheke also explores questions related to identity and otherness through actions – performances of which he is the choreographer.
The generic title given to them is “swaying identities” (saynète pour un abri de gare, le crocus, le derviche et Van der Rohe…) and also take place in the urban space. In saynette pour un abri de gare (skit for a station shelter) 9 characters make sort of socially coded gestures like a ritual dance in that of the whirling dervish, the dance created in the spaces of the Mies Van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona appears to the visitor like a mesmerising apparition that created a strong resonance with the free plane and the fluidity of transparent spaces of architecture.
A visual artist, but paradoxically an artist with few objects, Paul Maheke enjoys developing this art of the potential furtive encounter that induces a less authoritarian relationship with art. This discrete presence that leads it to index his work with subtlety in the urban space is a manner of fading without disappearing for as much and ensuring that each apparition results in a disappearance to be reborn and disappear again.
Paul Maheke never returns to the locations of his actions or his scenography. Of these furtive actions, he only keeps documentary traces that he integrates in various forms (drawings, engraved mirror, photographs, video..) in an exhibition system in which he enjoys offering the visitor the possibility of playing a part (framed works placed on the ground inducing the possibility of moving them and manipulating them like objects waiting for another life…)

text by Daniel Bosser for the 59th Salon de Montrouge‘s catalogue, 2014